Every day I do a full render of a head after gestures as some of you know. This morning I pushed things further. Really just like how this "practice" piece came out and wanted to share it.
Watching Zmodeler Brush tutorials helped me create this almost entirely out of box sculpting. Only a little bit of hpolish and clay build up.
and I exported that into photoshop to create this:
I feel like I'm getting a bit ahead of myself with this stuff so I'll probably dial it back a bit on the extra exploration of the program, but I had a lot of fun working on this once I figured out all the fun functionality of that brush!
Looks very nice I especially like the color scheme you chose for the plane as well as the shading and rendering
@jpbennett02 thank you!!
looks very nice!
Damn Adam! Awesome fold practise! The dress looks so realistic! Good job!
Can you by the way recommend resources that were helpful to you in learning the technical skill of painting form and rendering? 
Cheers, Mau
First, thank you! It felt good to make some progress on something again.
As far as resources for rendering / painting form / etc, I spent all weekend thinking about this. I've had a lot of practice. A lot. Thats probably where I picked most of it up through the years. Lots of studio art classes. Lots of sketching / drawing / etc.
As far as actionable advice, I don't know much about your process but I will try to suggest some things that I actively do.
I'm going to link you to a chalk sponge brush that I LOVE. Not great for getting sharp edges, but is very helpful for blending values. I do also use soft round and some of marc's brushes depending on what I'm doing but this is a specific tool I'm using.
Get that brush here - it's free.
Any time I'm rendering I have opacity Jitter on, but I also adjust the master opacity of my brush to get more subtle blending if I need to. I usually keep it between 60-80 when doing this, but have taken it as low as 30 if I really just want to barely adjust things.
As far as form goes, I think that really was just logging hours. Observation. I was fortunate enough to have a lot of studio art classes where we used live models. Copying photos is fine, but I made more progress when I was observing in person. Still life paintings aren't really covered in the beginning like they were for me in college, but before we painted the human figure I had a whole semester of still lifes we did that forced us to observe the relationships between objects, the light, the shadows, etc. Using a variety of textures surfaces.
I'm toying with the idea of recording myself tonight to maybe re-examine my process to see if there's anything else I'm doing that might help others. In the mean time if I find something useful I'll make sure to share it.
Anatomy Exercises / assignments.
I found that some muscles on the back don't really match the simplified version that was presented in the video. Specifically the rotator muscles on the back attached to the shoulder blade. It severely threw me off when trying to recreate the muscles over the top of pictures of people as those shapes just don't match up at all to the little rectangle. So I did some more indpendent research and then everything seemed to click. I did the multiple angles last week. The singular back view on the right was this morning and has been more challenging for me to pick up with all the different overlapping muscles. Going to continue to practice these but will focus more on the clothing / zbrush classes now and hopefully make more progress.
that looks really believable! especially the shirt 
also your insights about your rendering process is awesome to read, I'm not really thinking much about that yet, but learning more about how other people work is kind of inspiring(? can't find good words to describe it, more like "yay I'm not alone in that process of learning stuff"-feeling)
Thank you so much for taking the time to answer my question so thoroughly!
In the past few days I've observed some youtube artists use changing opacity settings in their work just like you recommended, I'll make sure to try it out!
The point about live models is a very interesting one, I can imagine that seeing things in actual 3d space is a lot different than from foto reference! Thanks for sharing these insights!
Thank you @yaigrie and @mau.wamp! Happy to share about my process as much as I am able. Before starting art classes I have gotten super frustrating watching art "tutorials" where it's more a time-lapse and the artist doesn't share any helpful information in the video. Spent a lot of time analyzing footage until I found Marc's short tutorials that are amazing and very helpful.
Sharing my new daily warm up / practice routine below. Folding in the anatomy i've learned along with gestures and head practice.
and my second clothing attempt on a nude model.
Will attempt a full image from reference later this week.
Nice heads and gesture practice! I feel like you could go darker with the shadows in the shirt and pants while it does show some form it looks a little flat to me in some areas, but I may not be taking into account the lighting. great practice overall though!
very nice! I like the additions you added to the clothes.
6 weeks of daily practice.
Wow, that's really cool to see your whole work in one image! Great idea!
It really shows your dedication and hard work in order to get better!
Keep it up, Adam!
I've been continuing my practice. However I've spent a good amount of time these past few days making multiple attempts at the zbrush assignment to do a creature bust. Not only was I feeling uninspired, but the program itself has been difficult for me to grasp. There is SO much you can do and it's hard to figure out what setting I've toggled that is messing me up. Thank goodness for google. Anyway. Here is a WIP on that creature bust. Finally going in a direction I'm pleased with!
